Pelican is configurable thanks to a settings file you can pass to
the command line:

pelican content -s path/to/your/pelicanconf.py

(If you used the pelican-quickstart command, your primary settings file will
be named pelicanconf.py by default.)

Note

When experimenting with different settings (especially the metadata
ones) caching may interfere and the changes may not be visible. In
such cases disable caching with LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE=False or
use the --ignore-cache command-line switch.

Settings are configured in the form of a Python module (a file). There is an
example settings file
available for reference.

All the setting identifiers must be set in all-caps, otherwise they will not be
processed. Setting values that are numbers (5, 20, etc.), booleans (True,
False, None, etc.), dictionaries, or tuples should not be enclosed in
quotation marks. All other values (i.e., strings) must be enclosed in
quotation marks.

Unless otherwise specified, settings that refer to paths can be either absolute
or relative to the configuration file.

The settings you define in the configuration file will be passed to the
templates, which allows you to use your settings to add site-wide content.

If you manage multiple languages, you can set the date formatting
here. See the “Date format and locale” section below for details.

USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY=True

When you don’t specify a category in your post metadata, set this
setting to True, and organize your articles in subfolders, the
subfolder will become the category of your post. If set to False,
DEFAULT_CATEGORY will be used as a fallback.

DEFAULT_CATEGORY='misc'

The default category to fall back on.

DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT='%a%d%B%Y'

The default date format you want to use.

DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU=True

Whether to display pages on the menu of the
template. Templates may or may not honor this
setting.

DISPLAY_CATEGORIES_ON_MENU=True

Whether to display categories on the menu of the
template. Templates may or not honor this
setting.

DEFAULT_DATE=None

The default date you want to use.
If 'fs', Pelican will use the file system
timestamp information (mtime) if it can’t get
date information from the metadata.
If set to a tuple object, the default datetime object will instead
be generated by passing the tuple to the
datetime.datetime constructor.

DEFAULT_METADATA={}

The default metadata you want to use for all articles and pages.

DOCUTILS_SETTINGS={}

Extra configuration settings for the docutils publisher
(applicable only to reStructuredText). See Docutils
Configuration settings for more details.

FILENAME_METADATA='(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}).*'

The regexp that will be used to extract any metadata
from the filename. All named groups that are matched
will be set in the metadata object.
The default value will only extract the date from
the filename.
For example, if you would like to extract both the
date and the slug, you could set something like:
'(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'.
See Path metadata and SLUGIFY_SOURCE.

PATH_METADATA=''

Like FILENAME_METADATA, but parsed from a page’s
full path relative to the content source directory.
See Path metadata.

Delete the output directory, and all of its contents, before
generating new files. This can be useful in preventing older,
unnecessary files from persisting in your output. However, this is
a destructive setting and should be handled with extreme care.

OUTPUT_RETENTION=[]

A list of filenames that should be retained and not deleted from the
output directory. One use case would be the preservation of version
control data. For example: [".hg",".git",".bzr"]

JINJA_EXTENSIONS=[]

A list of any Jinja2 extensions you want to use.

JINJA_FILTERS={}

A dictionary of custom Jinja2 filters you want to use.
The dictionary should map the filtername to the filter function.
For example: {'urlencode':urlencode_filter}
See Jinja custom filters documentation.

Change the locale. A list of locales can be provided
here or a single string representing one locale.
When providing a list, all the locales will be tried
until one works.

LOG_FILTER=[]

A list of tuples containing the logging level (up to warning)
and the message to be ignored.
For example: [(logging.WARN,'TAG_SAVE_ASissettoFalse')]

READERS={}

A dictionary of file extensions / Reader classes for Pelican to
process or ignore. For example, to avoid processing .html files,
set: READERS={'html':None}. To add a custom reader for the
foo extension, set: READERS={'foo':FooReader}

IGNORE_FILES=['.#*']

A list of glob patterns. Files and directories matching any
of these patterns will be ignored by the processor. For example,
the default ['.#*'] will ignore emacs lock files, and
['__pycache__'] would ignore Python 3’s bytecode caches.

MD_EXTENSIONS=['codehilite(css_class=highlight)','extra']

A list of the extensions that the Markdown processor
will use. Refer to the Python Markdown documentation’s
Extensions section
for a complete list of supported extensions. (Note that
defining this in your settings file will override and
replace the default values. If your goal is to add
to the default values for this setting, you’ll need to
include them explicitly and enumerate the full list of
desired Markdown extensions.)

OUTPUT_PATH='output/'

Where to output the generated files.

PATH

Path to content directory to be processed by Pelican. If undefined,
and content path is not specified via an argument to the pelican
command, Pelican will use the current working directory.

PAGE_PATHS=['pages']

A list of directories and files to look at for pages,
relative to PATH.

PAGE_EXCLUDES=[]

A list of directories to exclude when looking for pages in addition
to ARTICLE_PATHS.

ARTICLE_PATHS=['']

A list of directories and files to look at for articles,
relative to PATH.

ARTICLE_EXCLUDES=[]

A list of directories to exclude when looking for articles in addition
to PAGE_PATHS.

OUTPUT_SOURCES=False

Set to True if you want to copy the articles and pages in their
original format (e.g. Markdown or reStructuredText) to the
specified OUTPUT_PATH.

OUTPUT_SOURCES_EXTENSION='.text'

Controls the extension that will be used by the SourcesGenerator.
Defaults to .text. If not a valid string the default value
will be used.

RELATIVE_URLS=False

Defines whether Pelican should use document-relative URLs or
not. Only set this to True when developing/testing and only
if you fully understand the effect it can have on links/feeds.

Base URL of your website. Not defined by default,
so it is best to specify your SITEURL; if you do not, feeds
will not be generated with properly-formed URLs. You should
include http:// and your domain, with no trailing
slash at the end. Example: SITEURL='http://mydomain.com'

TEMPLATE_PAGES=None

A mapping containing template pages that will be rendered with
the blog entries. See Template pages.

STATIC_PATHS=['images']

A list of directories (relative to PATH) in which to look for
static files. Such files will be copied to the output directory
without modification. Articles, pages, and other content source
files will normally be skipped, so it is safe for a directory to
appear both here and in PAGE_PATHS or ARTICLE_PATHS.
Pelican’s default settings include the “images” directory here.

STATIC_EXCLUDES=[]

A list of directories to exclude when looking for static files.

STATIC_EXCLUDE_SOURCES=True

If set to False, content source files will not be skipped when
copying files found in STATIC_PATHS. This setting is for
backward compatibility with Pelican releases before version 3.5.
It has no effect unless STATIC_PATHS contains a directory that
is also in ARTICLE_PATHS or PAGE_PATHS. If you are trying
to publish your site’s source files, consider using the
OUTPUT_SOURCES setting instead.

TIMEZONE

The timezone used in the date information, to
generate Atom and RSS feeds. See the Timezone
section below for more info.

TYPOGRIFY=False

If set to True, several typographical improvements will be
incorporated into the generated HTML via the Typogrify library,
which can be installed via: pipinstalltypogrify

TYPOGRIFY_IGNORE_TAGS=[]

A list of tags for Typogrify to ignore. By default
Typogrify will ignore pre and code tags. This
requires that Typogrify version 2.0.4 or later is installed

DIRECT_TEMPLATES=['index','categories','authors','archives']

List of templates that are used directly to render
content. Typically direct templates are used to generate
index pages for collections of content (e.g., tags and
category index pages). If the tag and category collections
are not needed, set DIRECT_TEMPLATES=['index','archives']

PAGINATED_DIRECT_TEMPLATES=['index']

Provides the direct templates that should be paginated.

SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH=50

When creating a short summary of an article, this will
be the default length (measured in words) of the text created.
This only applies if your content does not otherwise
specify a summary. Setting to None will cause the summary
to be a copy of the original content.

EXTRA_TEMPLATES_PATHS=[]

A list of paths you want Jinja2 to search for templates.
Can be used to separate templates from the theme.
Example: projects, resume, profile ...
These templates need to use DIRECT_TEMPLATES setting.

Regular expression that is used to parse internal links. Default
syntax when linking to internal files, tags, etc., is to enclose
the identifier, say filename, in {} or ||. Identifier
between { and } goes into the what capturing group.
For details see Linking to internal content.

PYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS=[]

A list of default Pygments settings for your reStructuredText
code blocks. See Syntax highlighting for a list of
supported options.

SLUGIFY_SOURCE='title'

Specifies where you want the slug to be automatically generated
from. Can be set to title to use the ‘Title:’ metadata tag or
basename to use the article’s file name when creating the slug.

If set to 'reader', save only the raw content and metadata
returned by readers. If set to 'generator', save processed
content objects.

CACHE_PATH='cache'

Directory in which to store cache files.

GZIP_CACHE=True

If True, use gzip to (de)compress the cache files.

CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD='mtime'

Controls how files are checked for modifications.

LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE=False

If True, load unmodified content from caches.

WRITE_SELECTED=[]

If this list is not empty, only output files with their paths
in this list are written. Paths should be either absolute or relative
to the current Pelican working directory. For possible use cases see
Writing only selected content.

FORMATTED_FIELDS=['summary']

A list of metadata fields containing reST/Markdown content to be
parsed and translated to HTML.

The first thing to understand is that there are currently two supported methods
for URL formation: relative and absolute. Relative URLs are useful
when testing locally, and absolute URLs are reliable and most useful when
publishing. One method of supporting both is to have one Pelican configuration
file for local development and another for publishing. To see an example of this
type of setup, use the pelican-quickstart script as described in the
Installation section, which will produce two separate
configuration files for local development and publishing, respectively.

You can customize the URLs and locations where files will be saved. The
*_URL and *_SAVE_AS variables use Python’s format strings. These
variables allow you to place your articles in a location such as
{slug}/index.html and link to them as {slug} for clean URLs (see
example below). These settings give you the flexibility to place your articles
and pages anywhere you want.

Note

If you specify a datetime directive, it will be substituted using the
input files’ date metadata attribute. If the date is not specified for a
particular file, Pelican will rely on the file’s mtime timestamp.
Check the Python datetime documentation for more information.

This would save your articles into something like /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/index.html,
save your pages into /pages/about/index.html, and render them available at
URLs of /posts/2011/Aug/07/sample-post/ and /pages/about/, respectively.

Setting name (followed by default value, if any)

What does it do?

ARTICLE_URL='{slug}.html'

The URL to refer to an article.

ARTICLE_SAVE_AS='{slug}.html'

The place where we will save an article.

ARTICLE_LANG_URL='{slug}-{lang}.html'

The URL to refer to an article which doesn’t use the
default language.

ARTICLE_LANG_SAVE_AS='{slug}-{lang}.html'

The place where we will save an article which
doesn’t use the default language.

DRAFT_URL='drafts/{slug}.html'

The URL to refer to an article draft.

DRAFT_SAVE_AS='drafts/{slug}.html'

The place where we will save an article draft.

DRAFT_LANG_URL='drafts/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The URL to refer to an article draft which doesn’t
use the default language.

DRAFT_LANG_SAVE_AS='drafts/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The place where we will save an article draft which
doesn’t use the default language.

PAGE_URL='pages/{slug}.html'

The URL we will use to link to a page.

PAGE_SAVE_AS='pages/{slug}.html'

The location we will save the page. This value has to be
the same as PAGE_URL or you need to use a rewrite in
your server config.

PAGE_LANG_URL='pages/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The URL we will use to link to a page which doesn’t
use the default language.

PAGE_LANG_SAVE_AS='pages/{slug}-{lang}.html'

The location we will save the page which doesn’t
use the default language.

CATEGORY_URL='category/{slug}.html'

The URL to use for a category.

CATEGORY_SAVE_AS='category/{slug}.html'

The location to save a category.

TAG_URL='tag/{slug}.html'

The URL to use for a tag.

TAG_SAVE_AS='tag/{slug}.html'

The location to save the tag page.

AUTHOR_URL='author/{slug}.html'

The URL to use for an author.

AUTHOR_SAVE_AS='author/{slug}.html'

The location to save an author.

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS=''

The location to save per-year archives of your posts.

MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS=''

The location to save per-month archives of your posts.

DAY_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS=''

The location to save per-day archives of your posts.

SLUG_SUBSTITUTIONS=()

Substitutions to make prior to stripping out
non-alphanumerics when generating slugs. Specified
as a list of 2-tuples of (from,to) which are
applied in order.

Note

If you do not want one or more of the default pages to be created (e.g.,
you are the only author on your site and thus do not need an Authors page),
set the corresponding *_SAVE_AS setting to '' to prevent the
relevant page from being generated.

Pelican can optionally create per-year, per-month, and per-day archives of your
posts. These secondary archives are disabled by default but are automatically
enabled if you supply format strings for their respective _SAVE_AS settings.
Period archives fit intuitively with the hierarchical model of web URLs and can
make it easier for readers to navigate through the posts you’ve written over time.

Example usage:

YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS='posts/{date:%Y}/index.html'

MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS='posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/index.html'

With these settings, Pelican will create an archive of all your posts for the
year at (for instance) posts/2011/index.html and an archive of all your
posts for the month at posts/2011/Aug/index.html.

Note

Period archives work best when the final path segment is index.html.
This way a reader can remove a portion of your URL and automatically
arrive at an appropriate archive of posts, without having to specify
a page name.

DIRECT_TEMPLATES, which are ['index','tags','categories','archives']
by default, work a bit differently than noted above. Only the _SAVE_AS
settings are available, but it is available for any direct template.

If no DATE_FORMATS are set, Pelican will fall back to
DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT. If you need to maintain multiple languages with
different date formats, you can set the DATE_FORMATS dictionary using the
language name (lang metadata in your post content) as the key.

In addition to the standard C89 strftime format codes that are listed in
Python strftime documentation, you can use - character between % and
the format character to remove any leading zeros. For example, %d/%m/%Y will
output 01/01/2014 whereas %-d/%-m/%Y will result in 1/1/2014.

DATE_FORMATS={'en':'%a, %d %b %Y','jp':'%Y-%m-%d(%a)',}

You can set locale to further control date format:

LOCALE=('usa','jpn',# On Windows'en_US','ja_JP'# On Unix/Linux)

Also, it is possible to set different locale settings for each language. If you
put (locale, format) tuples in the dict, this will override the LOCALE
setting above:

Not all metadata needs to be embedded in source file itself. For example, blog posts are often named
following a YYYY-MM-DD-SLUG.rst pattern, or nested into
YYYY/MM/DD-SLUG directories. To extract metadata from the
filename or path, set FILENAME_METADATA or PATH_METADATA to
regular expressions that use Python’s group name notation(?P<name>…).
If you want to attach additional metadata but don’t want to encode
it in the path, you can set EXTRA_PATH_METADATA:

By default, Pelican uses Atom feeds. However, it is also possible to use RSS
feeds if you prefer.

Pelican generates category feeds as well as feeds for all your articles. It does
not generate feeds for tags by default, but it is possible to do so using
the TAG_FEED_ATOM and TAG_FEED_RSS settings:

Setting name (followed by default value, if any)

What does it do?

FEED_DOMAIN=None, i.e. base URL is “/”

The domain prepended to feed URLs. Since feed URLs
should always be absolute, it is highly recommended
to define this (e.g., “http://feeds.example.com”). If
you have already explicitly defined SITEURL (see
above) and want to use the same domain for your
feeds, you can just set: FEED_DOMAIN=SITEURL.

FEED_ATOM=None, i.e. no Atom feed

Relative URL to output the Atom feed.

FEED_RSS=None, i.e. no RSS

Relative URL to output the RSS feed.

FEED_ALL_ATOM='feeds/all.atom.xml'

Relative URL to output the all-posts Atom feed:
this feed will contain all posts regardless of their
language.

FEED_ALL_RSS=None, i.e. no all-posts RSS

Relative URL to output the all-posts RSS feed:
this feed will contain all posts regardless of their
language.

If you want to use FeedBurner for your feed, you will likely need to decide
upon a unique identifier. For example, if your site were called “Thyme” and
hosted on the www.example.com domain, you might use “thymefeeds” as your
unique identifier, which we’ll use throughout this section for illustrative
purposes. In your Pelican settings, set the FEED_ATOM attribute to
thymefeeds/main.xml to create an Atom feed with an original address of
http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml. Set the FEED_DOMAIN
attribute to http://feeds.feedburner.com, or http://feeds.example.com if
you are using a CNAME on your own domain (i.e., FeedBurner’s “MyBrand” feature).

There are two fields to configure in the FeedBurner interface: “Original Feed” and “Feed
Address”. In this example, the “Original Feed” would be
http://www.example.com/thymefeeds/main.xml and the “Feed Address” suffix
would be thymefeeds/main.xml.

The default behaviour of Pelican is to list all the article titles along
with a short description on the index page. While this works well for
small-to-medium sites, sites with a large quantity of articles will probably
benefit from paginating this list.

You can use the following settings to configure the pagination.

Setting name (followed by default value, if any)

What does it do?

DEFAULT_ORPHANS=0

The minimum number of articles allowed on the
last page. Use this when you don’t want the last page
to only contain a handful of articles.

DEFAULT_PAGINATION=False

The maximum number of articles to include on a
page, not including orphans. False to disable
pagination.

PAGINATION_PATTERNS

A set of patterns that are used to determine advanced
pagination output.

Defines how the articles (articles_page.object_list in
the template) are sorted. Valid options are: metadata as a
string (use reversed- prefix the reverse the sort order),
special option 'basename' which will use the basename of
the file (without path) or a custom function to extract the
sorting key from articles. The default value,
'reversed-date', will sort articles by date in reverse
order (i.e. newest article comes first).

PAGE_ORDER_BY='basename'

Defines how the pages (PAGES variable in the template)
are sorted. Options are same as ARTICLE_ORDER_BY.
The default value, 'basename' will sort pages by their
basename.

Creating Pelican themes is addressed in a dedicated section (see Creating themes).
However, here are the settings that are related to themes.

Setting name (followed by default value, if any)

What does it do?

THEME

Theme to use to produce the output. Can be a relative
or absolute path to a theme folder, or the name of a
default theme or a theme installed via
pelican-themes (see below).

THEME_STATIC_DIR='theme'

Destination directory in the output path where
Pelican will place the files collected from
THEME_STATIC_PATHS. Default is theme.

THEME_STATIC_PATHS=['static']

Static theme paths you want to copy. Default
value is static, but if your theme has
other static paths, you can put them here. If files
or directories with the same names are included in
the paths defined in this settings, they will be
progressively overwritten.

CSS_FILE='main.css'

Specify the CSS file you want to load.

By default, two themes are available. You can specify them using the THEME
setting or by passing the -t option to the pelican command:

Sometimes, a long list of warnings may appear during site generation. Finding
the meaningful error message in the middle of tons of annoying log output
can be quite tricky. In order to filter out redundant log messages, Pelican
comes with the LOG_FILTER setting.

LOG_FILTER should be a list of tuples (level,msg), each of them being
composed of the logging level (up to warning) and the message to be ignored.
Simply populate the list with the log messages you want to hide, and they will
be filtered out.

To speed up the build process, Pelican can optionally read only articles
and pages with modified content.

When Pelican is about to read some content source file:

The hash or modification time information for the file from a
previous build are loaded from a cache file if LOAD_CONTENT_CACHE
is True. These files are stored in the CACHE_PATH
directory. If the file has no record in the cache file, it is read
as usual.

The file is checked according to CHECK_MODIFIED_METHOD:

If set to 'mtime', the modification time of the file is
checked.

If set to a name of a function provided by the hashlib
module, e.g. 'md5', the file hash is checked.

If set to anything else or the necessary information about the
file cannot be found in the cache file, the content is read as
usual.

If the file is considered unchanged, the content data saved in a
previous build corresponding to the file is loaded from the cache,
and the file is not read.

If the file is considered changed, the file is read and the new
modification information and the content data are saved to the
cache if CACHE_CONTENT is True.

If CONTENT_CACHING_LAYER is set to 'reader' (the default),
the raw content and metadata returned by a reader are cached. If this
setting is instead set to 'generator', the processed content
object is cached. Caching the processed content object may conflict
with plugins (as some reading related signals may be skipped) and the
WITH_FUTURE_DATES functionality (as the draft status of the
cached content objects would not change automatically over time).

Checking modification times is faster than comparing file hashes,
but it is not as reliable because mtime information can be lost,
e.g., when copying content source files using the cp or rsync
commands without the mtime preservation mode (which for rsync
can be invoked by passing the --archive flag).

The cache files are Python pickles, so they may not be readable by
different versions of Python as the pickle format often changes. If
such an error is encountered, it is caught and the cache file is
rebuilt automatically in the new format. The cache files will also be
rebuilt after the GZIP_CACHE setting has been changed.

The --ignore-cache command-line option is useful when the
whole cache needs to be regenerated, such as when making modifications
to the settings file that will affect the cached content, or just for
debugging purposes. When Pelican runs in autoreload mode, modification
of the settings file will make it ignore the cache automatically if
AUTORELOAD_IGNORE_CACHE is True.

Note that even when using cached content, all output is always
written, so the modification times of the generated *.html files
will always change. Therefore, rsync-based uploading may benefit
from the --checksum option.

When only working on a single article or page, or making tweaks to
your theme, it is often desirable to generate and review your work
as quickly as possible. In such cases, generating and writing the
entire site output is often unnecessary. By specifying only the
desired files as output paths in the WRITE_SELECTED list,
only those files will be written. This list can be also specified
on the command line using the --write-selected option, which
accepts a comma-separated list of output file paths. By default this
list is empty, so all output is written.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-from__future__importunicode_literalsAUTHOR='Alexis Métaireau'SITENAME="Alexis' log"SITEURL='http://blog.notmyidea.org'TIMEZONE="Europe/Paris"# can be useful in development, but set to False when you're ready to publishRELATIVE_URLS=TrueGITHUB_URL='http://github.com/ametaireau/'DISQUS_SITENAME="blog-notmyidea"REVERSE_CATEGORY_ORDER=TrueLOCALE="C"DEFAULT_PAGINATION=4DEFAULT_DATE=(2012,3,2,14,1,1)FEED_ALL_RSS='feeds/all.rss.xml'CATEGORY_FEED_RSS='feeds/%s.rss.xml'LINKS=(('Biologeek','http://biologeek.org'),('Filyb',"http://filyb.info/"),('Libert-fr',"http://www.libert-fr.com"),('N1k0',"http://prendreuncafe.com/blog/"),('Tarek Ziadé',"http://ziade.org/blog"),('Zubin Mithra',"http://zubin71.wordpress.com/"),)SOCIAL=(('twitter','http://twitter.com/ametaireau'),('lastfm','http://lastfm.com/user/akounet'),('github','http://github.com/ametaireau'),)# global metadata to all the contentsDEFAULT_METADATA={'yeah':'it is'}# path-specific metadataEXTRA_PATH_METADATA={'extra/robots.txt':{'path':'robots.txt'},}# static paths will be copied without parsing their contentsSTATIC_PATHS=['pictures','extra/robots.txt',]# custom page generated with a jinja2 templateTEMPLATE_PAGES={'pages/jinja2_template.html':'jinja2_template.html'}# code blocks with line numbersPYGMENTS_RST_OPTIONS={'linenos':'table'}# foobar will not be used, because it's not in caps. All configuration keys# have to be in capsfoobar="barbaz"